Dutch Agendia raises $65m

Amsterdam – The Dutch company will use the funds to expand commercialisation of their current breast cancer suite of tests, as well as for development of the personalised medicine pipeline, announced CEO David Macdonald. „The support we have received in this round of financing is a strong reflection of our recent growth and confidence in the commercialisation of our product pipeline in the future“, he added.

The financing round was led by the Swiss drug development company Debiopharm Group, with significant support from all of Agendia's current investors, including The Van Herk Group, ING Corporate Investments, Breedinvest and Gilde Healthcare. Korys, the Colruyt family office, was among the new investors.

Agendia's Symphony suite of breast cancer products is based on the analysis of hundreds of genes in a patient's breast tumour biology It is currently on the market in the US and Europe and includes several staging, subtyping, recurrence and therapy selection assays. Together, these tests might help physicians determine a patient's individual risk for metastasis, which patients will benefit from chemo, hormonal, or combination therapy, and which patients do not require these treatments and can instead be treated with other less arduous and less costly methods. „Agendia will support genuine win-win strategies and facilitate the reduction of the gap between the diagnostic and the drug world," said Thierry Mauvernay, Delegate of the Board of Debiopharm.

Agendia was founded in 2003 as a spin-off from The Netherlands Cancer Institute and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital in Amsterdam, for the purposes of pursuing commercialisation of molecular diagnostics using DNA microarray technology for cancer diagnosis and drug development.

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